Last week the crypto Market continued its long-term downtrend with BTC falling to 18K and ETH Flash crashing down to 1.
2 K despite Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake.
I say despite because it was believed that the merge would bring large institutional inflows but so far not much.
This downturn in crypto prices was made worse by the more than 400 million dollars in liquidations of leveraged Traders as always the Silver Lining is that this should make prices a little less volatile in the short term but it looks like ETH could still be in a bit of trouble.
That’s because Ethereum miners who were put out of business by the merge are still holding more than 300 million dollars worth of ETH which they will presumably sell at some point.
Note that Ethereum miners only sold around 20 million dollars of ETH leading up to the merge.
There are likely many Ethereum validators who are looking to sell some of their steak teeth luckily it’s going to be at least another 6 to 12 months before unstaking is possible and we may not see much selling on that front.
In the meantime there will be no shortage of macro factors that could take the crypto markets lower.
The elephant in the room is the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases and many of you will know that the FED raise interest rates by another 75 basis points last week.
What many of you may not know however is that lots of other central banks raised interest rates last week too including the bank of England.
The resulting tightening of financial conditions around the world is now leading to fears of a global recession and this really seems to be the top of the iceberg.
There is one macro factor and one crypto specific factor that could do serious damage to the crypto Market as soon as this week.
These are Russia’s escalation of the Ukraine conflict and a potential Crackdown on crypto projects by the SEC.